Computer Science

With President Obama calling math and science education the key to good jobs in our future economy, Congress was told Wednesday that a pilot program in Los Angeles schools has started to show promising results in computer science.

Yahoo Chief Executive Scott Thompson is expected to step down Sunday after dissident shareholders called attention to his apparent misrepresentation of his college credentials. News of the impending departure was credited to multiple unnamed sources by the Wall Street Journal's technology blog AllThingsD. In an email sent to Yahoo employees last week, Thompson, 54, apologized to workers at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Internet company. "The board is reviewing the issue and I will provide whatever they need from me," Thompson wrote.

In a move designed to help meet the fast-growing work force needs of the high-technology industry while broadening students' career opportunities, UC Irvine's department of information and computer science has created a master of science program. Beginning next fall, graduate students will be allowed to work toward their master's degree in one of six areas of study, including computer system design and software.

An activist investor is demanding thatYahoo Inc.fire its new chief executive, Scott Thompson, after the Internet company confirmed that his resume contained misleading information about his education. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company confirmed Thursday that Thompson's credentials, questioned recently by a shareholder, incorrectly stated in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that he holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Stonehill College. The company called it an "inadvertent error.

University of California regents have created the system's first computer science school at UC Irvine, elevating the profile of the fast-growing department at the campus, which has long had a national reputation in the field. The move, officials say, will enhance research and recruiting at UCI's new School of Information and Computer Science, which was at the forefront of the academic specialty when the department was formed in 1968.

UC Irvine said it has boosted its enrollment of computer science and engineering students to help meet California's insatiable demand for technical workers. This fall, UCI's Department of Information and Computer Science expects to enroll 196 freshman, 61% more than last year's starting class of 122. The School of Engineering is enrolling 166 freshman, up 42% from last year.

Leonid Khachiyan, 52, a Rutgers University professor and a noted expert in computer science whose work helped computers process extremely complex problems, died Friday of a heart attack at his home in South Brunswick, N.J. In 1979, Khachiyan found an efficient way to solve programming problems that were thought to be intractable because they dealt with an often astronomically large number of options.

John Cocke, a revered computer scientist who helped transform software and microprocessors, has died. He was 77. Cocke, who held more than a dozen patents, died July 16 in a Valhalla, N.Y., hospital after a series of strokes. A leading IBM designer for 37 years, Cocke was considered the father of Reduced Instruction Set Computer, or RISC, technology--an invention that led to faster computation and a key to most computers in use today.

In 1959, Fletcher Roseberry Jones, a marketing whiz, and Roy Nutt, a technical expert, quit their aerospace jobs, pooled together $100 in start-up capital and launched what would become a new industry. Nearly five decades later, Computer Sciences Corp. is one of the world's largest information technology firms, employing 78,000 people and generating $14 billion in annual revenue.

The biggest question in theoretical computer science today is whether there is a way to make hard problems easy. In computers, as in life, it looks as if there isn't. To be more specific: A "hard" problem is one that grows exponentially, like the so-called traveling salesman problem, about which more in a moment. As the number of possibilities increases, these problems quickly get out of hand, even for the fastest computers.

Google Inc.'s first hired employee, Craig Silverstein, is leaving the tech giant where he's worked since its founding to sign on with the rising education start-up Khan Academy. Silverstein, who was technically Google's third employee, after co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was instrumental in creating the search engine that built Google into one of the world's leading tech companies. Google's search engine was its first product and is still its most widely used. Google and Khan Academy confirmed Silverstein's move Thursday.

Politico headlined a story last week "Mitt, Paul winning Facebook primary. " About the same time, the Washington Post reported "Romney with the momentum in S. Carolina," that conclusion based on its new Twitter-tracking app, @MentionMachine. One of the most striking innovations of campaign 2012 media coverage has been the attempt by news outlets to harness Twitter and Facebook, not just for a spot check on individual voters' feelings but to take the temperature of the electorate in a broader way. The vast trove of messages and status updates embedded in Facebook, in particular, has created what technology journalist-blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick called "the biggest, most dynamic census of human opinion and interaction in history.

Supercomputers may routinely defeat human chess champions these days, but sometimes regular folks still beat out fancy technology. An example published in the journal Nature this week: Lay people were better than a computer program dreamed up by scientists at figuring out how a complicated protein takes its shape. In a broad array of disciplines — molecular biology, astronomy, archaeology and more — researchers are outsourcing their time-consuming dirty work to volunteer gamers and everyday people with some extra hours on their hands, with promising results.

That new iPad is tempting. But what if you put the money in Apple stock instead? If the past is any guide, it might be more profitable to buy Apple shares instead of Apple products. For example, if in 1997 you had bought Apple stock instead of spending $5,700 on the PowerBook laptop, you'd be sitting on about $330,000. If these sorts of calculations are beyond your skills, Web developer and UC Berkeley computer science student Kyle Conroy has come up with an easy-to-read "Apple Product or Stock" spreadsheet on his website, http://www.

Whether it's C-3PO, the fastidious "Star Wars" droid fluent in 6 million languages, or "Star Trek's" invisible but convenient "universal translator," the miracle interpreter has been a favorite device of science fiction. But now, on planet Earth, Google Inc. is using its vast computational and intellectual resources to put that futuristic technology directly in the hands of consumers. If you're traveling in Beijing and find yourself hungry for some American cuisine, you can activate the translator on your Google-powered phone and say, "Where can I find a hamburger?"

UC Irvine has long sought to be known for preeminence in fields such as engineering, medicine and business. But now the university is embracing a new discipline: video games. Once ridiculed within university halls as merely a nerdy pastime, computer games are being promoted to a full-fledged academic program at the Irvine campus, a medium as ripe for study as the formats before it: film, radio and television. This fall UC Irvine established the Center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds, and construction is underway on a 4,000-square-foot, 20-room "Cyber-Interaction Observatory" for faculty research.

Don't get Rob Kling wrong. The UC Irvine professor of computer science loves his computer. But he also thinks society's love affair with the "computer revolution" has masked a true understanding of the effects of computers, both negative and positive, on modern society. Kling co-edited a collection of essays on the controversial aspects of computers aptly entitled "Computerization and Controversy." The book is being used as a textbook in about 40 colleges around the country.

Aiming to enhance its reputation as a leader in computer science, UC Irvine has reinstated its master's program, accepted 61% more freshmen and will improve its facilities by the fall. Already running the third-largest undergraduate computer science program among universities west of the Rockies, UCI is expanding rapidly to meet the voracious demands of the booming technology industry, UCI officials said.

With President Obama calling math and science education the key to good jobs in our future economy, Congress was told Wednesday that a pilot program in Los Angeles schools has started to show promising results in computer science.